This article focuses on the approaches to the longitudinal seismic response analysis of shield tunnels

and presents a new simplified dynamic finite element method

which accepts some basic ideas of response displacement method.This method uses the same structure model and spring model as response displacement method

but uses the finite element method to estimate the responses of the ground in time series instead of the supposition of harmonic motion.This method could give more reasonable results compared with the response displacement method

because it could improve the precision of the evaluation of ground deformations.At the same time

this method has much smaller scale of calculation compared with the 3-D continuum model.Subsequently

both the response displacement method and the new simplified dynamic finite element method are applied to calculate the seimic responses of Wuhan Changjiang River Tunnel

with the emphasis on the difference of the results given by different methods.